Mike Rice was fired on Wednesday as head coach of Rutgers University's men's basketball program, which was no shock. As soon as ESPN broke its explosive story describing allegations of verbal and physical abuse during Rice's tenure—with that damning video of the coach chucking basketballs off player heads and legs—it was going to happen, no matter how long the university wanted to drag its feet, parse the discussion, or offer nonsense like re-education and first offenses. Rice was gone, gone, gone. Out the door. No question. That brief delay from Tuesday to Wednesday was just a few final coughs of institutional torpor. Sensible people knew what needed to be done.

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Now it's done and Rice is gone and there will be the predictable round of apologies and re-examinations and hard questions for the university leadership, chief among them Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti, who evaluated the mounting case against Rice last year and decided a three-game suspension and $50,000 would suffice as punishment. Clearly it did not. Now a story that Rutgers hoped would fade in the rear view has come back with a national fury, and the digging out will be political and painful. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is upset. LeBron James has condemned from afar. A program is deeply damaged. So is a school.

But before getting lost in the fallout it would be useful to take a step back and consider the broader picture, which is how a school with presumably good intentions could get to this point, how its sense of priorities and values could become so skewed it took the public airing of a videotape for people in charge to do the right thing. To be clear: The claims against Rice were stunning. But the conclusion seems sadly familiar:

Look at that ESPN videotape again, if you can bear it. This wasn't your crabby old high-school coach dropping F-bombs and making slackers run wind sprints after practice. You or I would be sacked on the spot for behavior like Rice's. That's not a politically correct opinion. It's expected human decency.

But Mike Rice wasn't like you and me. Until Wednesday morning, Rice was a college basketball coach, and in the alternate universe of college athletics, coaches are treated as extraordinary beings, commanding comical salaries often despite little loyalty, and playing under different rules. Witness the walk-on-water idol worship that routinely surrounds coaches in events like the NCAA tournament and bowl games. It's enough to make you gag. An environment has been created in which mortals are elevated to unsustainable heights, and standards are routinely set aside in favor of more seductive objectives:

Winning. Money.

Those are powerful drugs, difficult to resist. Rutgers isn't a sports juggernaut—the basketball program under Rice was utterly pedestrian—but it has been ambitious. It recently signed on into the Big Ten conference, a starry move that earned plenty of raves and signaled a bold new chapter. But that invitation that had less to do with Rutgers's desirability as an athletic program, and more to do with its geography, which allows the Big Ten to widen its reach to the East Coast and tap further into a new and lucrative television market. Schools and administrators love to talk about competition and opportunity and student experiences. But reach into the valves. Money oils the whole machine.

Rutgers wanted in on the big-time, even as it acted small. With Rice's December suspension, the school hoped to deftly defuse the crisis, offering a sanction and fine and a narrative that coach had learned his lesson and would get better. It appears there was more than a whiff of institutional arrogance to the plan. Did Rutgers really think that was that? How did they expect it would not all eventually get out? Even on Tuesday, as the ESPN story spread, there was a perplexing resistance: Pernetti told the sports network's "Outside the Lines" program he did "not have a line of players and coaches or anybody else complaining about the matter." Going forward, he'll be lucky to have players lining up at all. What high-school star fielding offers will be eager to play basketball at the school? What parent will freely send a child to a university that chose to protect a coach's future over its students?

At the risk of sounding terribly naive let me remind that Mike Rice wasn't working for a Fortune 500 company or a hard-charging startup. He wasn't a petulant Hollywood director or a reckless contestant on reality TV. He was at a university, where the primary goal—despite all the warped priorities and millions in college sports—is supposedly to teach and prepare a next generation. Rutgers has a choice: What kind of school does it want to be? What does it stand for? Right now it looks like another school that got swept up by sports, and learned a lesson the hard way: when faced with the truth, the truth is undefeated.

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